Posts Tagged ‘reputations’

Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s Reputations, his fourth novel to appear in English (translated again by Anne McLean), is a timely meditation on the rights and responsibilities of free speech. Javier Mallarino is political cartoonist, “a moral authority for half the country, public enemy number one for the other half” but a man with power and influence:

“…able to cause the repeal of a law, overturn a judge’s decision, bring down a mayor, or seriously threaten the stability of a ministry, and all this with no other weapons than paper and India ink.”

He refuses to be cowed or bought: “I won’t get into bed with anybody.” When his wife, Magdalena, complains he is attacking their friends in his cartoons, he replies, “Well, let’s change friends.” However, he is also guilty of inflating his importance, claiming people “need someone to tell them what to think.” As Magdalena says:

“Don’t be naïve…People already know what they think. People already have their prejudices well formed. They only want someone in authority to confirm their prejudices, even if it’s the mendacious authority of the newspapers.”

As the novel opens, Mallarino is preparing to accept an award to celebrate the forty years of his career; as he puts it, “the very same political class he’d attacked and hounded and scorned from his redoubt… had decided to put the gigantic Columbian machinery of sycophancy into action to create a public homage.” It is at the ceremony that Mallarino meets Samanta Leal who originally claims to be a journalist, but is, in fact, after answers to more personal questions.

Samanta, it transpires, was a childhood friend of Mallarino’s daughter Beatriz at one point, and once spent the day with her while Mallarino held a party. The party is interrupted by an unwelcome guest, a politician, Cuellar, whom Colon has recently lampooned. Cuellar all but begs Mallarino, “please, Javier…please don’t draw me like that anymore. I’m not like that.” Mallarino finds himself disgusted by what he sees as Cuellar’s weakness:

“…feeling a confusing emotion that went beyond contempt, something that wasn’t irritation or annoyance but seemed dangerously close to hatred.”

Before Cuellar leaves a strange incident occurs involving Samanta. The two girls have been caught drinking the dregs from abandoned drinks and been sent up to bed to sleep off the effects. When Samanta’s father comes to collect her there is an altercation with Cuellar who seems to be upstairs with the girls; the father follows him down shouting, “What did you do to my little girl?” The implication is that he has sexually assaulted Samanta as she lay sleeping. Samanta’s first memory is of being placed in her father’s car; years later, no longer in touch with her father, she has come to Mallarino in an attempt to discover what happened. Mallarino claims not to know, but his own suspicions are clear from a cartoon he draws shortly after with the caption:

Mallarino says the “image had formed in is head” the next morning and talks of feeling not “indignation or rage, but rather something more abstract, like disquiet, almost like the awareness of a possibility…Of a power, yes, that was it: the awareness of an imprecise power.”

Just as Mallarino takes people and reduces them to caricatures, the recovery of his past forces him to reconstitute them as individuals. He must revisit the devastating effects his cartoon has on Cuellar while at the same time facing up to the fact he assumed rather than searched for the truth. His crusading style may seem to serve justice but his lack of awareness of Samanta’s existence as a victim leads us to question his motivation.

“What good is ruining a man’s life, even if the man deserves ruin? What good is this power if nothing else changed, except the ruin of that man?”

Reputations reminds us of the dangers of the broad stroke, the black and white approach. It is, in itself, an argument for the more complex, nuanced art of the novel.